You Are My Yes

It was late. I had plans. I rearranged.

She was laughing at her own joke. Simply, effortlessly, uninhibited. And I kept thinking of how she was her own yes. Hell, was she a yes.

We had met in the middle, some diner along main street. It was almost a supernatural force, some kind of enigmatic coercion, each unable to fight the impulse to get to that middle ground. We were magnets drawn together to fill the voids of the opposing charge, to counteract the negative forces each carried. It was as if our entire being depended upon it.

Get in the car, she had said. Drive. drive in my direction. I obeyed.

She was my little 2 am secret, my sister.

The waitress had stopped passing by to check if we had signed the bill. Though there were people and events and responsibilities pining for our presence elsewhere, neither she nor I could leave. not yet.

These are the talks I remember. The heavier the eyelids, the sincerer the words. The silence not awkward, but a shared intimacy of the unfilled spaces.

Words were sparse and chosen carefully. They were words we had not yet dared speak aloud, as if the saying alone made them true, made them real. They were words that terrified and engrossed, suggested and enchanted.

And in this disclosure, we offered ourselves, unguarded, knowing that if our self vanishes, there would be another to lean on, one separate and distinct, but pumping the same blood through different veins.

She was tripping on those words as she twirled the ice in her water glass with a straw, her purple fingernails reflecting the dim lighting.

I don't know how it came to this, she said. I enjoy his presence. 

She loved him, some boy down the street. She didn’t know it, couldn't find the words, but we both knew once she did, there would be no need for me to give her an answer. The answer would be in the telling.

I realized as I leaned into the edge of the table in rapture, that in her dismayed disclosure, I saw myself.

And what about me? She waited for my answer and I felt that I, too, was waiting for my own reply. I told her I needed nothing more than the sea and someone to share it with and a million reasons to write.

Yes, she said. Yes, and when you find it, always say yes.

An answer to her own question.

© 2013 by Rachel Lowry. All rights reserved {photo source via}